In a virtual space designed to feel like a pickup bar, but I wish we’d seen each other across the ravaged land of the apocalypse. Rubble of the old life slowly decaying under warm light of the indifferent morning sun, and I would have seen you in the mess, golden skin tight over sinewy muscles, pulling junk together to build into use. What we did, though, was get right down to the pitch, sending quippy slogans with photos so delicately lit and precisely angled they would’ve made the ad men of an earlier era weep. In the other time, we could’ve titillated each other with sordid tales of who we’d sliced open to stay whole ourselves. We could’ve stripped our starved bodies behind the cement wall and pressed our mouths into one another for the taste of nostalgia because nobody would have had time for kissing anymore at the end of the human world. But we would have made the time, kissed sloppily for hours, until our lips were swollen with desire and we’d foolishly stopped listening for the people hungry for little bits and pieces of our flesh. Instead, we sat down on opposite sides of a small round table, sipping nine-ingredient cocktails and building a conversation up out of carefully selected little bits and pieces of our lives. In the apocalyptic world, there would be no small round tables with herbaceous cocktails, no chitchat about weather patterns or political scandal; there would only be breathing or bleeding right now. We would not have asked about the bibliophilic significance of roasted honey-infused chili peppers at the bottom of the $19 drink named Fahrenheit 451, we would have asked how much water we needed to keep living and how much blood we could spill before we died. You would have asked me if I knew how to splint a broken limb, pushing my hips against the mossy cement, and as my breath quickened, I would have asked how fast you could run in bare feet. But instead, I told you I’d been reading about new theories on foreign language acquisition, and you told me you had produced a film about incest that you were hoping would make it into Cannes. I invited you back to my house to drink wine and look at my pareidolia photo collection, and when you smiled, the sharp dimples in your cheeks sliced me into a million pieces. In the new world, we would’ve gone back-to-back and fought the darkness with wooden sticks pounded with nails. I would’ve said, I can start a fire with only broken glass and wood shards, and you would’ve told me that you can cook a meal out of bricks and branches, and we would’ve said, yes, okay, this can work. In the old world, we let our legs mingle on my overstuffed couch as we laughed over each other’s stories, and you asked, can I kiss you, confident and curious, and I said, yes, okay, this can work.
Kali Thurber spends her time living in imaginary worlds and occasionally jotting a few words down on paper.
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